OkCupid triumphs where eHarmony does not!

I've been using OkCupid since April of 2006 (on the service, I'm WhigBrew).  Recently, MyPoints offered me 100 points to do an eHarmony personality profile, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  After taking quite a while - as I knew from previous experience it would - it told me I was one of the 1 in 5 people regarding whom they decided it would be better to turn down than offer their services. 

There are two reasons for this, both of which don't apply to OkCupid:  Accuracy, and - a derivative - marketing.  Certain types of people are likely harder to match, and so accepting them as members means you're more likely to disappoint them, and, aggregating all such cases, make your service less accurate at matching eligible singles.  Less accuracy hurts your marketability, a.k.a. "bragging rights."

OkCupid personalizes it's matching to you, the user, because as you answer more questions, the computer "knows" you more.  Plus, you can personalize your profile all the more by taking user-made quizzes and being scored on measures with which you identify, or in ways you think the person you're seeking (for friendship, a penpal, or even a match) would like to know.  Not only does this make the service more accurate and informative, it also means even if you don't find your soulmate (and if you don't within the first 6 months, the service is free for many more than 6 months, so they still beat match.com), you can have fun learning about yourself, which is bound to make  you a better mate when you do find someone - online or elsewhere!

As alluded to, OkCupid is free.  Now, while a "tightwad" is not every lady's dream come true, I doubt many people enrolled in college full time as I am have money to spare on a dating service.  I'm certainly not a lone in looking for my match while in my 20s, and most people in their 20s are a lot less likely to be upwardly mobile.  A lot of networking services online are free, and successful (i.e. MySpace), so why shouldn't dating be?  Thanks to OkCupid, it is.

They could still do more.  They could add "learning" to their service so that it's matching algorithms measure the peoples profiles you look at typologically and try to learn more about you beyond what you know about yourself and then give to the computer as data.  After all, I'm sure many of us look for attributes we don't even know we want!  OkCupid updates quite often, though.  We're not always happy with the updates - we users vocalize this discontent in our journals sometimes, too - but at least it shows they're trying to improve the site.  Overall, I'd say the improves tend to be better than not.